The seamy side of gossipy small towns in New England has been a literary fixture since Hester Prynne defiantly sported that scarlet letter, but Grace Metalious' 1956 potboiler, "Peyton Place," ripped the scabs off the secret festering wounds in Eisenhower America.

With its combination of adultery, murder, abortion and class and race privilege, Metalious' thinly veiled account of life in her own hometown of Gilmanton, N.H., became one of the best-selling and most widely denounced books of its time, as well as a popular film and a television show. Metalious, however, drank away her fortune and her life by age 39.

Paul Edwards, who adapts and directs Metalious' walk on the sordid side for City Lit Theater, last year tackled with some success another classic about outcasts in New England with Shirley Jackson's gothic "We Have Always Lived in the Castle." But this time around the tone and the structure both seem to have slipped away from him. The result is an overlong and rather staid approach to Metalious' prose. And when a novel begins with the famously lurid line "Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle," one expects the temperature of its onstage homage to soar.

That line is penned by precocious teen author Allison McKenzie (Catherine Gillespie), who lives with her "widowed" mother, Constance (Sheila Willis), and whose only friend is wrong-side-of-the-tracks Selena Cross (Sara Renee Gilbert), whose abuse at the hands of her stepfather, Lucas (Dave Skvarla), provides a major plot point.

With a video monitor counting down the chapters in the middle of Jacob Watson's deliberately fusty set, one might expect a bit of a Brechtian touch, but Edwards hasn't decided if he wants to send up the histrionic excesses of Metalious' interlocked episodic tales of small-town obsessions and betrayals with a campy wink-and-a-nod or play it straight.

Rollins (Todd Neal), the editor of the town paper, serves as an obvious — too obvious by the end — homage to the Stage Manager in "Our Town" (another story set in a parochial New Hampshire burg). But his brief expositional appearances don't add much to our understanding of the beating hearts underneath the tangled civic dynamics, even as he lays out the complicated racial history of the village for Allison.

By the second act, which feels as if it has two or three possible endings too many, the actors seem to be running in place with the material. Still, there are some fine zesty performances sprinkled throughout the cheesy subject matter, including Mark Pracht's surly-but-straight-arrow Tom Makris, the school principal who woos Allison's mother, Christina Renee Jones in the dual roles of nerdy high schooler Kathy and bad girl Betty, and Jeremy Myers as Norman Page, the mama's boy who, I'm convinced, provided the first-name inspiration for a certain Mr. Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho."